At some point in my sophomore year, my father handed me a slim little book. “Reena, I need you to read this. Read it once, read it twice, read it as many times as you need to until you fully understand how to apply it to your life.”
Yeah, right. Whatever.
Ok, in all honesty, I really do respect my dad. And as much as he drives me crazy and as often as I do moan about him, I listen to the things that he says. And he’s taught me a lot. So I did read the book. Twice. Maybe skimmed it the second time. Maybe never actually read it properly the first time through. It’s called The 60 Second Motivator. Or something. And although I thought it was a load of bullshit before I actually read it, strangely enough, it was helpful.
The book talks about a physical therapist who’s well known for his ability to motivate anyone, literally anyone, in under 60 seconds (and might I add that my bullshit detector is fine tuned). Turns out the guy actually could motivate people, in less than 60 seconds (they had a stopwatch, apparently) to do their physical therapy. And it only took two steps.
My father initially gave me the book so that I would be motivated to actually make straight A’s for the first time in my life since 8th grade. But I’ve found myself applying the mantras of this book to just about every other aspect of life except school. And in this case, I’m referring to Ultimate.
I hate running. Give someone an iPod and some running shoes and they’re good to go. Me? No way. I can’t do it. Ten minutes in, my feet hurt, I have a stitch in my side, I’m bored, and all I want to do is drink a smoothie. Don’t ask me how I played soccer from age 11 until the end of high school, or how I now play Ultimate. I think the “chasing [insert object related to sports here]” aspect has a lot to do with it. But over the summer, I had to find some way to motivate myself to go running. I couldn’t possibly send emails out to the women telling them to workout and play pick-up if I didn’t do it myself. And with my internship, that meant my only workout was to go running at 6:30 in the morning. Ew. So of course, thanks to Father Dearest, I had the 60 second motivator. I would literally lie in bed and muster up the motivation to go running at the crack of dawn. It… did take me longer than 60 seconds, but usually it worked.
There are two steps to motivation:
1) It has to be something that you believe is doable. If you don’t think you can do, you’re not going to be motivated to do it.
2) There has to be something about it that’s meaningful enough for you to actually do it. You have to find the importance in it.
Can I go running? Is it doable? Well, yeah. I don’t want to, but yeah. So what’s important enough about it? Well shit, that’s the tricky bit. So I thought about the frisbee girls. All 15 of them (at that time we only had 15). I would think about every single one of them, individually, as I gathered the motivation (after hitting the snooze button a couple of times) to go outside. What I found to be important in waking up at 6:30 to go running were the girls. Because I knew that if I were to be in terrible shape and unable to play every point, then I could never expect any of them to be in good shape, either.
I feel like motivation is one of the biggest obstacles I’ve had to face as being captain. Motivating an entire team is difficult. How do you get your teammates to want every disc? How do you get your teammates to fight to be on for the next point? How do you get them to cut as hard as they can, to jump as high as they can, to play the tightest defense that they can? How do you get them to cheer for each other on the sidelines and communicate on and off the field? How do you motivate them to play with the deepest passion that they have?
I don’t know. And it’s something that I’ve struggled with for the majority of the year. Personally, I don’t have to think twice about what motivates me to play the hardest that I can on the field. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I already know what motivates me about Ultimate and this team. I already know what’s important to me about it. I already know what’s meaningful enough about it so that I will play the hardest that I can.
At the end of the day, I don’t really know if motivation can really be broken down so easily. It makes sense. This book makes sense. But why is it still so hard to motivate others, not just on the team, but in general? I’m not really sure. But maybe everyone needs to take a few quick seconds to think about these things. Is this doable? Is playing my hardest at every single practice, every scrimmage, every drill, every game, every tournament doable? And if it is, then what’s meaningful enough about it that someone will play to their greatest ability?
I know this will vary individually. And maybe that’s why I can’t necessarily motivate everyone. But maybe we can help each other find that importance on and off the field. HUX, the Hendrix Ultimate eXperience, is this weekend –our annual tournament. And with the 7 inches of snow that’s on the ground right now, I think motivation is going to be pretty important.